Black Mirror: For Its Sixth Season, Charlie Brooker's Show Turns The Camera On Itself

Black Mirror has entered its Obsidian era — or selfie era if you will — reflecting not only the viewers and their tech anxieties but also the medium itself. Prahlad Srihari writes.

Black Mirror. Season 6

DEEPFAKES are spreading disinformation, propaganda and revenge porn at a rate countermeasures haven’t been able to keep up with. More than one country ended up electing a cartoon figurehead, prone to incendiary rhetoric, as their leader. Artists and writers could lose their jobs to generative AI. The march of technology is outpacing our ability to adapt to its unprecedented disruptions. Reality is threatening to derail the speculative fiction vehicle entire. At once expanding and fraying at the seams, the world as we know it is Black Mirror-ing pretty hard already. So, how does TV’s premier SF auteur Charlie Brooker extend the shelf life of his anthology series and not fall behind?

By turning the camera inwards. By centring his focus on consumer appetites and the streaming services that feed them, including the one that houses his very own series. Black Mirror has entered its Obsidian era — or selfie era if you will — reflecting not only the viewers and their tech anxieties but also the medium itself. The modified statement of artistic intent is established in the sixth season’s very first episode, “Joan Is Awful”. Annie Murphy’s Joan is a woman about as awful as Renate Reinsve’s Julie was “The Worst Person in the World”. Which is to say: not really. Joan, like Julie, feels like she has become a spectator in her own life. Until the whole world starts to tune in as spectators of her life when the Netflix-like platform Streamberry makes a prestige comedy out of it starring Salma Hayek. Every action and interaction she engages in from morning to night gets packaged into the next episode, ready for mass consumption.

For at the end of the day, personalised content is king. The conveyor belt needs to keep producing bottomless entertainment with a quick turnaround to keep the binge-watchers satisfied. The real lives of real people are merely source code for future programming. Think of how biopics and true crime series can turn tragedies into a circus for the masses without the consent of the victims — all so that viewers have endless choices in how they wish to be entertained. As if a star being attached to the project as the lead legitimises our prurient interests. “That’s real. That’s not fucking content,” asserts David (Samuel Blenkin) in Episode 2, “Loch Henry”, when fellow filmmaker and girlfriend Pia (Myha’la Herrold) tries to convince him into making a documentary about the serial murders in his Scottish hometown which collaterally killed his policeman father. It doesn’t take a whole lot of convincing. David’s personal connection to the true crime in fact becomes the hook, on the insistence of a Streamberry exec. But a late twist alters the personal nature of the doc wholesale. We see the film as a streamable option right next to “Finding Ritman” (a doc about Will Poulter’s character from Bandersnatch) in “Joan Is Awful”. Joan wants to watch it. Her fiancé (Avi Nash) doesn’t, insisting “I can’t really do another true crime.”

There is no denying the sentiment is a relatable one. The tragedy-for-profit industry (from true crime to dark tourism) is sure put on the chopping block this season. We also get a heady cocktail of anxieties over privacy invasion, not reading the terms and conditions before hitting ‘agree’, and racism at its most insidious. Brooker really leans into comedy as cushion for the horrors, with a Boney M-disguised disco demon attached to a talisman, a pack of feral paparazzi, and the instantly iconic moment of Salma Hayek shouting “Let’s kill this quam-puta”.

No more is Black Mirror exclusively about technological nightmares. Broadening the scope of its targets has, needless to say, made its satire less pointed. As always, the show has a lot of nifty ideas. Only they are rattled through like a guy trying to show off all his credentials at a speed-dating event. Most dissipate undeveloped or underdeveloped. For a second straight season, there isn’t a single episode that could be considered a touchstone of genre TV. “Joan Is Awful” is less the standout — there really isn’t one — than a sign of change.

When the show premiered on Channel 4 back in 2011, it wasn’t quite the cultural juggernaut it is today. Silicon Valley had convinced most that technology was an unimpeachable force of good. A panacea even. Black Mirror came at the right time as a reality check. Each episode forced us to examine our relationship with our gadgets. Concerns over surveillance or AI in their infancy were escalated from the personal to the public, the local to the cosmic, to show how accepting tech as the saviour for our shortcomings could lead to a loss of control and a loss of our humanity itself. But a British series speculating about tech nightmares being co-opted by a tech nightmare and rebranded as a Netflix original — is the ironic exclamation point on Black Mirror’s success story as a genre unto itself.

Curiosity is the original sin or at least close to it in Black Mirror. Just as uncovering buried secrets proves lethal in “Loch Henry”, so does not letting sleeping dogs lie in “Mazey Day”. Paparazzi chase after a starlet who has fallen off the grid — only to be devoured by what they find. The bloody conclusion however doesn’t redeem its otherwise defanged critique of how the media feeding frenzy can turn people into monsters. When the season travels to outer space in “Beyond the Sea”, it becomes strangely inert. Cliff (Aaron Paul) and David (Josh Hartnett) are astronauts on a deep space mission in an alternate 1969. So that work doesn’t entirely disrupt their personal lives, both have their consciousnesses transferred back to their true-to-life robot replicas back on Earth. Until a tragedy puts the two in a dilemma where they have to share a single body. The episode animates itself dramatically as an unimaginative study into marital loneliness, grief and temptation, instead of a queasy body-snatching thriller about identity in the digital age.

The final episode, “Demon 79” is another period piece, this time set in Thatcher’s Britain, where timid sales clerk Nida (Anjana Vasan) is forced to suffer racial macro- and microaggressions on a daily basis. When a demon (Paapa Essiedu) convinces Nida she must kill three people to avert the apocalypse, she reluctantly channels her rage into the seemingly world-saving enterprise. “Demon 79” is the one episode with a sense of style, borrowing from giallo classics. But it fails to deliver an effective payoff. Though the season risks some bold narrative and tonal twists to tap into anxieties beyond tech, it cannot achieve the perceptive heights of milestone episodes like “Be Right Back”, “San Junipero” or “USS Callister”.

Even if reality can sometimes seem like something out Black Mirror the show hasn’t lost its appeal because of it. The forbidding inevitability of things going horribly wrong for the characters on the show makes our own world’s march towards apocalypse feel slower. The delay somewhat gives you hope that it could be staved off. Cynicism can be comforting in its own way. If the show-within-the-show is called “Joan is Awful” and not “Joan is Amazing”, it’s because viewers love a good feel-bad show. As Michael Cera’s control room operator puts it, “We did try more affirmative content...but we found that our subjects just didn't buy it. It didn't chime with their neurotic view of themselves. What we found instead was when we focused on their more weak or selfish or craven moments, it confirmed their innermost fears and put them in a state of mesmerised horror. Which really drives engagement. They literally can’t look away.”

The same however can’t be said about the new season of Black Mirror. But there is hope yet the show will return for another season. There is hope yet it will return to form. There is hope yet the studios and the streamers will strike a fair deal with the writers. Because what is the alternative? The next set of episodes will be cranked out by DALL-E and their reviews by ChatGPT? Nothing sounds more terrifying.

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